Greed, greed, greed.
 

Snuck into Scapa flow in April 1940 on my first 100% realism patrol. I found two Auxiliary Cruisers and Fleet Carrier....stationary! Since I assume it was her planes that killed four of my seamen earlier in the mission, on the other side of the Orkneys, I was up for revenge :stare: ! Not a destroyer in sight or sound...lovely! Keeping quiet and moving slowly, just in case, I lined myself up on the carrier.

The CV went down with four torps and crept round to engage the Auxiliary cruiser with the stern tube, then back around to loose another one with the bow. I let the torp go just as I heard ping...ping...so the DDs had shown up. I didn't get to see the fireworks but my NA infromed me she was going down.

Should have ran after killing the CV but noooo, had to try for the Auxiliaries too. Two minutes later they're all over me....ping, ping, ping, ping, ping! I evaded the DCs for a while but eventually the inevitable happened....in Scapa there's no-where to run, it seems. The first dam great big ship I get to sink and I get depth charged to oblivion :dead: . My own fault, anyway.

Anyway rant over.

I was about to try to slip snugly in beside the sunken CV when I got plastered. I wanted see if it would confuse the DD's sonar and was wondering if anyone else has tried somethiing similar successfully?

My condolences to the families of the crew.

I rarely will go into Scap Flow..much to shallow to try to evade any destroyers that may detect you.If your detected you cant go deep and your as good as gone.Only thing I found that seems to work is take advantage of the dumb AI.I get as close to the land as posssible and when they make their depth charge run hope they go over you and beach themselves.Or if you find a subnet get close to it and or get on opposite side of it from the destroyers and watch them charge blindly into it sometimes blowing themselves up sometimes getting stuck and making for an easy target for you.

What I am wondering is this..isnt Scapa Flow supposed to be deeper than the game has it?Seems almost like it is way to shallow.

Your condolences are appreciated by the widows, I am sure.

Two ways round it then...I don't think I'll be going back in a hurry to try them out however!

I dug out an atlas and the best I can get for Scapa is less than 50m, it's not that accurate. I was finding depths of about 20/30/40m Been trying to find some sort of online map with even rough seabed contours but no luck. Sea charts cost money apparently! Might be worth it though when I have a few spare pennies....or at least a more detailed atlas!

The elevation data in the game is *very* coarse and rather inaccurate.

Bathymetry data is available for free, but almost certainly in formats unusable for the general public and rather coarse in terms of resolution. 3 km is about the max that's available for free.

I'm still planning to do some more detailed sea charts (i.e. more detailed than the one in the game), but lack of time sort of prevents me from doing so. It's a shame, because I have the software and everything for it.

I'll take it the software to use the data isn't available for free. I have a little GIS experience and could probably figure it out. If the resolution in SH3 is pretty poor anyway then low-resolution data would be all that would be required, really just to give a reasonable indication of depth in a given area. I haven't actually measured the resolution in SH3 yet but I can see it is very course, like you say.

It would be good to get some rough maps, though, since I find the in-game one quite hard to read. Another thing that strikes me is that the NA puts to sea with no charts. He has maps, yes, but there is not even an indication of depth on these. I've seen sea charts, coming form a island, and all, and I don't think that any skipper would put to sea with just a basic map. Reefs etc. would need to be marked, there are point depths and contours on real charts. Just a wee gripe that I hadn't thought of till now :D .